


Blackhawk and the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man

by imkerfuffled



Series: Lucia Castillo, Helper of Superheroes [8]
Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-17
Updated: 2018-05-17
Packaged: 2019-05-07 09:56:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14668626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imkerfuffled/pseuds/imkerfuffled
Summary: Lucia thinks she's in for a grueling day of driving lessons with her father until a certain web-slinger crashes into the hood of her car.





	Blackhawk and the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man

**Author's Note:**

> Here we have a very large time jump to get Lucia caught up with current MCU happenings (though obviously this takes place before Infinity War). Now she's sixteen and trying to put off getting her driver's licence. I was debating who she should run into here, but as soon as I realized she and Peter were the same age I knew it had to be him.
> 
> On a side note: why do I do all my writing at 4 in the morning?

Little Lucia was beginning to realize that she was, in fact, still fairly little, and in more than just stature. She had long outgrown the moniker “big kid” and was settling comfortably into “teenager,” but she knew she wasn’t quite ready for “adult” yet.

Especially if being an adult meant learning how to drive.

A car behind her honked loudly as she screeched to a last-minute stop at a red light, but Lucia almost didn’t hear it over all the shouting in the car.

“Stop! Stop!”

“What do you think I’m doing?”

“It’s red!”

“I know!”

Lucia glared across the oversized steering wheel at her dad, who, so far in this endeavor, had managed to teach her more about how  _not_ to drive a car than how  _to._ It should have been Adrian teaching her this—statistically, he held the best driving record out of the three functional adults in this family—but with him away at NYU on his baseball scholarship he didn’t have time to teach her anything.

She emphatically  _did not_ miss him.

Though she did, maybe, miss him a little bit when it came to her father’s skills as a driving instructor.

“Green!” he shouted, pointing unnecessarily at the light.

The beat-up old car lurched forward, jerking its two occupants against their seatbelts.

“Not so fast. Ease up,” her dad said in a panic.

“I’m easing!”

“Now turn north. No, that’s south!”

“I get my lefts and rights mixed up! How am I supposed to keep north and south straight?”

Lucia stewed for several more blocks as they jolted their way through traffic. She had the “going fast” and the “stopping” parts down alright; the problems came when she tried to do anything in the middle. All the while, her father kept up a running commentary of all the things she was doing wrong. She briefly considered stabbing him with the pencil rattling around on the dash, but that would involve taking her white-knuckled hands off the wheel.

Another car behind her honked its horn, and she muttered something rude under her breath.

This continued for nearly thirty tense minutes, by the end of which Lucia had the strong urge to rip her pigtails out. She had only just begun to reconsider her earlier option with the pencil when a red blur swung around the corner directly in front of her. It barreled into the ground, tumbling several feet before crashing straight into the cracked beige paint of Lucia’s hood.

Her father screamed and threw an arm over his eyes, but, just as she had all those years ago when that monster tore through her neighborhood, Lucia stared. And so she saw what her father did not.

The red blur that landed on her hood was a person.

She had just run over Spider-Man.

She put the car in park and flung open the door.

“Oh, please don’t be dead,” she muttered, wide-eyed, as she rushed to his side.

A quiet groan escaped his throat, and Lucia breathed a sigh of relief. He slowly pushed himself off the hood of the car and surveyed the Spider-Man-shaped dent in the metal. Somehow, his mask managed to look sheepish.

“Er… Sorry for dropping in unannounced,” he said, a far cry from his famous witticisms. Gingerly, he touched his hand to his forehead where, Lucia realized with a jolt, a dark stain was beginning to seep through the fabric of his suit. He staggered subtly to the side. Without thinking, she reached out to steady him, glancing down the street as she did so.

For the next split second—though it felt like much longer—only one thought ran through her head:  _I am touching Spider-Man’s arm! Spider-Man! Arm! Car!_

The split second ended, and she realized what she was seeing. At the far end of the side street stood, not a raging monster brought to life by the machinations of a reality warping fan of old Japanese films, no, this time it was simply a man.

A man wearing a skintight orange suit and throwing fireballs from his hands. Flames licked up and down his arms, and with every step he took the asphalt oozed and bubbled beneath his feet.

Lucia’s father said a word in Spanish that she wasn’t allowed to repeat.

Immediately, she closed her hand around Spider-Man’s arm and dragged him out of sight behind the car.

“Get in!” she hissed, pushing him toward the door. Spider-Man stumbled into the backseat with only minor protests, which, given his chatty reputation, was probably a bad sign. Lucia didn’t give herself time to reflect on the fact that she was bossing around  _Spider-Man_ like it was no big deal. She leapt into the driver’s seat and slammed her foot on the accelerator.

The car didn’t budge. She’d forgotten to put it in drive.

Lucia repeated the word in Spanish, while her dad shouted, “What the hell are you doing?”

Down the side street, the man with the flaming hands noticed the commotion and shot into the air.

“How can he fly with fire powers?” Lucia screamed. This time when she floored the gas pedal, the car leapt forward, tearing down the empty street with squealing tires. She risked a glance in the rearview mirror to see Spider-Man frantically trying to work the manual window crank. Beyond him, the flaming man rounded the corner in fast pursuit. “Who is he, anyway?” she added.

“I don’t know,” Spider-Man said, finally getting the window down. He stuck his head out the window and shot off a few webs at his attacker, raising his voice to be heard over the wind. “I just caught him trying to burn down a building, and now he’s after me.”

“What the  _hell are you doing!?”_ Lucia’s father repeated. She wasn’t sure which one of them he was talking to.

“Sorry sir, just gotta borrow your car for a—whoa!” Spider-Man ducked back into the car as a fireball streaked past the window. It hit the ground in an explosion of heat, momentarily engulfing the car in flames. Lucia screamed as concrete shrapnel pounded the hood, but she barreled through, unscathed aside from a few cracks in the windshield. Inside her chest, her heart threatened to beat right out of her Black Widow jacket.

“Dad, what’s Matchstick Man doing?” she said, too afraid of running off the road to look over her shoulder.

“He’s getting closer!”

“Crap.” Lucia tore her eyes off the road just long enough to glance at the speedometer. The car physically couldn’t go any faster. “ _Crap,”_ she said again. She stared straight ahead of her, forcing herself to go over her options.

Spider-Man was injured; she couldn’t just leave him here to fight this guy by himself, but if she kept driving like this, it wouldn’t be long before he caught up to them. She didn’t think the beat up old Toyota could survive a direct hit from one of those fireballs. Their only option was to lose him.

With no warning, she yanked the steering wheel to the right and slammed on the brake as the car swerved uncontrollably into an alley. All three occupants screamed. The car skidded into the side of the alley, scraping against the wall for several feet before Lucia managed to straighten it out. She looked beyond the shadows to the adjoining street beyond.

Cars streamed past the alley’s exit.

“Uh-oh,” Lucia said, “Uh-oh, uh-oh,  _uh-oh_!”

“Stop!” her father yelled.

Lucia didn’t stop. She wanted to shut her eyes, curl up in a ball in the backseat, and let her dad drive, but that wasn’t an option. She kept her foot glued to the gas pedal and prayed they wouldn’t crash.

They hit the road.

She yanked the wheel to the side again. Horns blared. Brakes squealed. Cars swerved around them. Everyone screamed again. Out of the corner of her eye, Lucia saw a car barreling straight toward them.

Now she shut her eyes tight, bracing herself for the inevitable.

But the inevitable never happened.

She heard a faint  _fwip_ and an angry car horn, but that was it. Cautiously, she opened her eyes.

The Toyota was racing safely down the center lane, and the car she’d nearly crashed into sat several yards behind them, stuck to the pavement by a giant mass of webbing.

Lucia let out a triumphant whoop. “Way to go, Spider-Man!” she cried, her voice jumping up an octave.

“Hate to be the bearer of bad news,” Spider-Man said, pointing out the window, “but I wouldn’t celebrate just yet.”

Lucia caught a glimpse of orange in the sideview mirror and swerved into the next lane. The fireball narrowly missed the car, passing so close that Lucia could feel its heat through the window. She heard a loud  _thump_ and an “oof!” from the backseat.

“Sorry!” she said.

“I’m okay!” Spider-Man said, accompanied by several softer thuds as he clambered back to the open window, “I’m o—”

Lucia saw an empty street branching off the one they were on and once again wrenched the wheel to the side, barely avoiding the shopfront on the street corner. The car barreled through a pair of trashcans on the sidewalk before Lucia got it back on the road. Spider-Man went flying again with a strangled yelp.

It was only then that Lucia realized the street was a dead end.

“Oh _crap!_ ” She slammed on the brake. With an ear-splitting squeal the car started to skid, and Lucia watched as the end of the street rushed closer.

They were going too fast.

The car crashed into the wall with enough force to leave Lucia breathless. The hood crumpled in on itself with a tortured grinding of metal. Spider-Man tumbled into the seat backs. For a moment, all was silent.

“Are you okay?” Lucia’s father gasped, clutching at Lucia’s shoulder. His other hand hovered shakily in front of him, as if to reassure himself he was still alive.

“I’m fine,” Lucia said, her voice shaking as hard as his hand. She twisted around, wincing slightly as the seatbelt dug into her already sore shoulder. “Spider-Man?”

Spider-Man’s thumb shot up from somewhere near the floor as he scrambled back onto the seat. “‘M good. All good. Never better, actually. Hey, this is just like my first time driv—uh-oh.”

A fireball blasted aside the two trashcans Lucia had run over, and the flaming man swung around the corner. Distracted by the effort it took to fly and shoot at the same time, he bounced off the far wall and lost some of his altitude. Whoever this guy was, he clearly hadn’t had his powers for long.

Suddenly, Lucia had an idea.

“Dad, pop the trunk!” She shoved the door handle until it opened, not bothering to see if he obeyed her order. “Spidey, if I get him to the ground can you web his hands so he can’t use his powers? Are your webs fireproof?”

“Uh, Karen…?” Spider-Man said, pausing at the end as if he was listening to something. For a brief moment Lucia panicked, thinking he’d hit his head harder than she realized, but she didn’t have time to worry about that.

“Yeah, I can do that. But how are you—” he continued, but Lucia had already rushed to the back of the car. She flung open the hood of the trunk and reached in.

A few days short of a week ago, Lucia’s father had taken her to the archery range to practice, and, she realized, she had never gotten around to putting her equipment away afterward.

She pulled her bow from the trunk, slung her quiver over her shoulder, and notched a purple-fletched arrow.

“Hey, jerkface,” she yelled, “get a load of this!”

The flaming man turned to face her, and she let the arrow fly.

It hit him square in the thigh and knocked him head over heels through the air, which gave Spider-Man just enough time to hop onto the wall and shoot a pair of webs at him. The man turned to face Spider-Man, the sticky fluid clinging to his side.

“We can’t just keep calling you jerkface, can we? I mean, that’s rude,” Spider-Man said, slinging off another web right into the man’s face. He dropped another five feet, clawing at his face to get the web off.

“Do you even talk?” Spider-Man continued, slinging more webs at him, “It’s cool if you don’t; I can talk for both of us.” He deepened his voice to impersonate the flaming man. “‘Hi, my name is Frank, and I can shoot fire from my hands.’ That’s cool, Frank, just please could you not shoot it at m—whoa!” Spider-Man leapt up to avoid another fireball, but, still off balance from his earlier injury, he lost his footing and slid down the wall a few feet before regaining it.

Lucia was using this time to line up her next arrow perfectly, but just as she was about to fire, a hand clasped her by the shoulder. She spun around to face whatever this new threat might be, but instead came face to face with her father.

“Lucia, stop this. We need to get out of here before it’s too late,” he pleaded.

“Dad,” she squared her jaw, looked him straight in the eye, and said, “I can’t do that. Right now Spider-Man needs help, and I can give it to him. I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be the kind of person who stands by and watches instead of lending a hand. Now get behind the car; you’ll be safer there.”

Her father’s hand slid from her shoulder without a word. He took a step back, and the look on his face spoke volumes that Lucia couldn’t even begin to read. For a moment, she wondered if this was what being an adult felt like.

But she didn’t have time to think about that; she had work to do.

She turned back to face the flaming man. Spider-Man had climbed higher up the wall and was now shooting him from above with net webs, trying to weigh him down. All his attention was focused on Spider-Man.

Once again, Lucia notched her arrow and, once again, lined up her shot.

“See if you can focus with  _this_  sticking out of you,” she muttered.

She fired.

The arrow hit its mark right in the center. A scream tore from the flaming man’s throat, and he immediately dropped to the ground, all flames extinguished. He stumbled and fell to his knees, clutching at the shaft of the arrow.

Spider-Man’s eye plates shot open wide, and Lucia’s hands flew to her mouth as she suddenly realized the unfortunate imagery she had created.

The arrow was sticking straight out of the not-so-flaming-anymore man’s crotch.

He tore out the arrow with a strangled cry, and a red stain quickly spread over the bright orange of his uniform. Before he could reignite his hands, Spider-Man descended on him, slinging web after web until his hands were encased in thick white cocoons.

Lucia pumped her fist in the air and let out a wordless shriek of triumph.

Spider-Man dropped lightly to the ground next to her,  _tsk-tsk_ ing at the man on the ground. “See, this is what happens when you play with fire, Frank. You get an arrow in your naughty parts, Frank. An arrow in your naughty parts. Don’t play with fire, Frank.”

‘Frank’ slumped over his knees in defeat.

With a few deep, adrenaline-fueled breaths, Lucia tore her eyes away from him and stared at Spider-Man. “That. Was—”

“So awesome! Where did you learn to do that?” Spider-Man shouted, his arms waving in excitement, “You just— _pew—_ and he—right in the—”

“ _Me!?_ Holy crap,  _you!”_ Lucia mimed his web-slinging. “With the car and— _‘Frank’—_ holy  _crap_!”

“You’re like a teenage Hawkeye, how cool is that!?”

Lucia froze in the middle of slinging her bow over her shoulder. The full magnitude of what she had just done finally began to sink in. This wasn’t like when she was ten, when she gave Black Widow her jacket; this was so much bigger than that. She had just helped take down an _actual villain_.

“Oh my god,” she said, “Oh my god, I’m a superhero!”

“You’re a superhero!”

“ _Oh my god!”_

Without thinking, Lucia grabbed Spider-Man by the shoulders—realizing, as she did, that he wasn’t that much taller than her—and they started jumping up and down in unbridled glee. Slightly manic peals of laughter escaped her throat.

This was everything she’d ever dreamed of.

“ _Whoa whoa,_  wait.” Lucia froze, and it took a few more bounces for Spider-Man to come to a halt too. “Can you really summon an army of spiders?”

Spider-Man grinned beneath his mask. “Yeah, totally. Big, hairy ones too. And they eat people.”

Lucia blinked.

“Nah, I’m messing with you,” he said, waving it off, “But you should definitely tell people that I can.”

“Oh, I can do one better,” Lucia said with a wicked grin, “My best friend runs a pretty popular superhero blog, and you can bet your butt this is going on there.”

Spider-Man gave her two thumbs up.

Lucia suddenly realized she still had her hands on his shoulders, and she quickly took them away. She could feel the heat rising in her cheeks and wished she had ice powers so she could cool them at will.

“So, uh…” she started to say, before Spider-Man glanced at ‘Frank,’ and the eyes of his mask widened. Lucia spun around just in time to see the formerly flaming man crawling toward the busy street. Spider-Man quickly slung a web at his foot, pinning him to the ground.

In all her excitement, Lucia had almost forgotten he was still there.

“I should, er, probably get Frank here to the hospital,” Spider-Man said with an apologetic smile, rubbing the back of his neck, “He should get his Frankie Jr checked out before I call the cops in.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“But we should totally team up again!”

“Yeah!” Lucia squeaked.

“Hold up,” her father interrupted. She had completely forgotten he was still there. Now, he emerged from behind the door of the car, holding his hands out in alarm. Both she and Spider-Man turned to face him. “There will be no team-ups of any kind. No superheroes. None of that.”

Lucia’s giddy smile turned into a frown, and she sighed heavily.

Spider-Man looked at Lucia, who simply shrugged in a defeated manner. “Oh. Okay then,” he said, “Sorry sir.”

Her father’s sigh was one of great relief.

But she was Lucia Castillo. She wasn’t about to let her dreams slip through her fingers—not when she was so close to achieving them, and certainly not in front of Spider-Man. While he picked up the defeated villain and awkwardly tried to position him for their web-assisted flight to the hospital, Lucia rushed to the car. She grabbed the little notebook her father used to track gas mileage from the glove compartment, hastily scribbled her phone number on it, and ran back to Spider-Man.

“ _Call me,”_ she mouthed, wiggling one hand next to her ear in the sign for “phone,” while the other slapped the piece of paper to the sticky webbing on ‘Frank’s hand.

He flashed her a grin and turned back to the busy street, about to sling a web to the building across from it. At the last second, he froze.

“Wait," he said, "I never got your name. You helped me out and everything, and I don’t even know who you are.”

Lucia opened her mouth to reply… and paused. A slow smile spread across her face.

“Blackhawk,” she said, “I’m Blackhawk.”

She didn’t need to turn around to see the look of horrified dismay on her father’s face.


End file.
